Porn Guardian Adds Pre-Emptive Pirate Blocking and Shopify Support

Today Porn Guardian has announced to huge additions to its real-time watermarking system: pre-emptive pirate blocking, and Shopify support.

In beta for the last 6 months, pre-emptive pirate blocking uses artificial intelligence to dynamically determine if a user is potentially a pirate. If so, they are denied access to customers’ content before they are able to download it and then upload it to pirate websites.

Porn Guardian’s real-time watermarking platform uses several different technologies to embed content downloads and streams with user information (including username, IP address and more) that cannot be erased by a pirate. Pirates can re-encode, change format, splice or otherwise edit content, take videos of their screens, etc…, but they will be unable to remove the watermarks.

The pre-emptive pirate blocking system is a platform that sits on top of the watermarking technology and allows (or disallows) access to the content based on whether the system thinks the user is a pirate. This works across all Porn Guardian clients, so if User X is a pirate on one client’s site, the Porn Guardian system will prevent them from downloading content from other Porn Guardian clients. The system doesn’t stop there, however. Unknown users (who are not tagged in the system as pirates) can also be denied access to content based on several different data dimensions concerning the user. That way, new potential pirates can be uncovered and blocked before they pirate, not after. The system has shown to be very effective.

“We tested the Pre-Emptive Pirate Blocking system out, letting the Porn Guardian platform identify new pirates before they stole our content. In our tests, we let the flagged users download the content anyhow, just to see if the pre-emptive blocking system would actually work. Over the span of 4 weeks, every pirated movie we found was from accounts that Porn Guardian flagged as probably being pirates. So, we turned the system fully on and can now prevent piracy before it even starts,” says Gary Blumenthall, webmaster of OLB Media.

Additionally, Porn Guardian has just released an extension to Shopify stores, which allows their real-time watermarking platform to be used with sites that sell their content on the Shopify platform, versus their own subscription sites. This allows a whole new group of customers to learn who is pirating their content.

Dominic Ford, co-founder of Porn Guardian adds, “We have always been committed to stopping piracy, not just cleaning up after it. We’ve offered various versions of real-time watermarking for the last 6 years. Linking pirated content back to it’s original downloader has been a huge differentiator between us and our competitors, and our ability to stop unknown new pirates before they commit a crime is unprecedented in our industry, and represents another huge step to stopping piracy in our industry. And now we can do this for our users on the Shopify platform in addition to traditional subscription sites.”